19/August/2004

For GNOME Nettool, we’re having now some bug
reporting action from Alan Cox to fix some issues he found. This, and the help from
Telsa in the documentation should deal with the raised issues in the desktop-devel-list thread.
Apart from that, once 1.0 is out (which will happen at GNOME 2.8 time), we will probably start
working on simplifying a lot more the interface, to avoid using technical terms at all.

Olympic Games

Spain is continuing its way to the medals in basketball, both in men and women
categories, with 3 victories in 3 games both. Both are already qualified for the
1/4 finals, so are just one game away from the medals.
The USA team, on the other hand, incredibly
continues to play pretty bad. They did beat Greece on Tuesday by little margin (77-71), and
had a lot of difficulties. Also, even though they won, the play they performed was pretty
bad, with individual plays all the time, which will make them fail again when they play against
teams with good defenses (like Puerto Rico).

In other sports though, Spain is doing pretty bad, with only one medal so far, and too
many opportunities lost, like in cycling, where we were favorites for one or two medals,
or in judo, where a few medals were expected. I took a look at the medal
table, and saw some of the countries that are
supposed to be similar to Spain (like France and Italy) way ahead of Spain. This means,
I guess, the same as for reasearch and development: that in Spain, money is spent in other
things, that’s why there are so few software development companies in Spain (there are a lot of consulting or
outsourcing ones), so few scientists doing real investigation here, and so few top level sportsmen.
In some sports, like football, basketball and handball, where we have the best (or one of
the best) leagues in the world, we do pretty well (except in football :), but in individual
sports, where the lack of money is notorious, we just have a few people that are good enough
in European championships (see if not the 11 medals obtained by Spain in last month’s
European swimming championships) but that fail when in world championships.

I hope the situation changes in the next few days, with the athletics, team sports and
yachting so we see more medals for Spain. I’ll be glad to have to rectify the above words, although
the initial objective of having more medals than in Barcelona’92 (22) is getting much more difficult
every day